STUART DAVIS (1894 - 1964)
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ARTWORK
This painting evokes a time and a place, but not in the most traditional way. Instead of literally showing the evening overtaking a seashore environment (a twilight), Stuart Davis uses simplified shapes and colors to suggest a personal experience of that event. The painting is cleverly constructed to suggest a recession into a shallow space by placing two planes, subdivided into other shapes, parallel to one another. We know that we are looking at a flat painting, but we see a colorful snapshot of sorts that is reminiscent of a stage set. The title, Summer Twilight, gives us a clue as to what the artist used as the source for his dynamic composition. We find buildings, clouds, a bird, and a train among other features.
ART HISTORY
European and American artists in the early twentieth century began to explore, and to expand, the limits of what was interpreted as art. Beginning in the nineteenth century, with styles such as French Impressionism, the boundaries began to crumble around the requirement that artists mimic reality as closely as possible by creating a “window” on the world and mankind’s experience of it. In all the creative arts, the fabric—that is notes of music, the words of literature or poetry, paint and canvas—gained as much importance for the artist’s means of expression as the concepts or subjects that underlie their composition in a work of art.
Modernism, as these movements toward abstraction and other unconventional art styles are sometimes called, gained worldwide acceptance by the middle of the twentieth century, and affected every creative field including design and architecture. Although its roots were in Europe, Modernism flourished in the United States where economic prosperity and a fluid social structure encouraged innovation and a celebration of technological advancements.
Modernism, as these movements toward abstraction and other unconventional art styles are sometimes called, gained worldwide acceptance by the middle of the twentieth century, and affected every creative field including design and architecture. Although its roots were in Europe, Modernism flourished in the United States where economic prosperity and a fluid social structure encouraged innovation and a celebration of technological advancements.
ARTIST
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Stuart Davis was one of the most original American artists of the early twentieth century. Although he reveled in the simplified forms, bright colors and expressive shapes of modernism, he claimed in his writings that he never abandoned realism in his art, and that he sought to express his experience of American life, landscape, and culture in his paintings.
His paintings are, like Summer Twilight, assemblages of recognizable forms such as the buildings and the bird, and elements of design that evoke visual elements and even sounds. For Davis, these assemblages also captured the element of time—the overlapping planes present objects simultaneously that are experienced sequentially, and thus for the artist his composition was a distillation of a moment in time. |
CONNECTIONS
Davis was inspired by the physical environment of twentieth-century urban life—forms of rapid transportation like automobiles, buses, subways that suggested speed, night-life that was symbolized by billboards, neon, and flashing signs. His colors and shapes are usually also felt to be influenced by his love of jazz music, with its syncopation and lively, repetitive rhythms.
Other artists in the Museum’s collection followed Davis’ practice of combining separate components to create a single, unified composition. Ray Kass (born 1944) made his painting Borrowed View, 1997-1998, by combining watercolor compositions that he made separately and in different places into one painting. Ke Francis (born 1945), in Nike and Flying Fish also incorporates seemingly unrelated images that have a personal meaning for him in this painting.
Other artists in the Museum’s collection followed Davis’ practice of combining separate components to create a single, unified composition. Ray Kass (born 1944) made his painting Borrowed View, 1997-1998, by combining watercolor compositions that he made separately and in different places into one painting. Ke Francis (born 1945), in Nike and Flying Fish also incorporates seemingly unrelated images that have a personal meaning for him in this painting.
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Ray Kass, Borrowed View, 1997-1998, watercolor on paper under beeswax mounted on wood panels; Ke Francis, Nike and Flying Fish, 1998, acrylic on canvas
DISCUSSION
Artists sometimes provide insight of their works for the viewer by providing titles. What recognizable images in Davis’ composition give you an idea of how this painting might be related to a summer twilight? Are there shapes in this painting that remind you of forms from nature without directly depicting them? Which ones? What function visually does the tall vertical beam that seems to be in front of the two planes in the background serve? How are the two sides different?